Project 31-A

This review covers “ Coding Faster: Getting More Productive with Microsoft Visual Studio: Covers Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010 ” by Zain Naboulsi and Sara Ford .   Why I Ordered the Book I ordered this book with the hopes of getting some quick and easy speed improvements to my coding style. If you are looking for just such a shortcut key primer, the poster address for all languages is available.  [ Alternative link to posters ] This book covers a bit more and takes a little more time to digest. That’s not bad.   Who should Buy this Book As a huge, feature-rich product with numerous versions, mastering Visual Studio is a challenge in itself. I must admit I tend to focus more on the language and SDKs of the current project, and less on the IDE. Sitting down with the book gave me time to correct that. If you have any desire to master your Visual Studio coding environment, buy this book .   Book Layout The book is organized with seven c...

This is my final comments on the book below (click to go to publisher site). First, I’m likely a tough reviewer having been a professional technical writer for Microsoft since the mid 1990’s and still doing that occasionally. Second, I’m a pedagogue (ex-teacher for those that are vocabulary challenged) and tend to read stuff at several levels – including suitability for teaching or mentoring. The first question is what type of book is this? This book will be a useful book on my bookshelf because it touches enough area in sufficient depth to serve as a cookbook for first recipes . The problem is that it try to span too many target audiences and as a result does not make it in any area well. Is it a Cookbook? The number of items covered and the crispness of the coverage suggests that it is. The problem is that if I compare it to the classic Cookbooks from O’Reilly, it is both too shallow and too sparse. It’s more a collection of recipes clipped from ‘Women’s Journal’ (or sho...

I’m continuing onwards with my review of . So far my biggest grip is that IMHO this is not an “Enterprise” book I would suggest Microsoft SQL Azure: Introduction to Application Development” – with that name, I would give the book good ratings as such (80%ile – better than 4 out of 5 similar books). With the existing time, it disappoints against what I expected.   Chapter 6: SSIS and SSRS Applications Using SQL Azure The author tried to kludge a solution to a problem in this chapter without doing analysis or coming up with a good solution.  A sharded solution for security is clumsy at best, there are better solutions for column level security. The issues of update and remedying  inconsistencies arising from sharding are neither raised nor addressed.  A simpler solution given that the end deliverable was a Microsoft Access database would be to just do pass through tables to the two SQL data bases and do an appropriate join in Microsoft Access. The second part...

I’m continuing onwards with my review of . For those that are interested, Microsoft is offering a 30-Day Pass:   USA Developers: Windows AzurePlatform 30-Day Pass We're offering a Windows Azure platform 30-day pass, so you can put Windows Azure and SQL Azure through their paces. Use promo code MSDNT1. No credit card required. With the Windows Azure platform you pay only for what you use, scale up when you need capacity and down when you don't. One Caveat : Microsoft’s “accept this license page” is case sensitive for your first and last name --- I suspect poor quality controls of their contractors… Chapter 3: Working with SQL Azure Databases from Visual Studio 2008 For a book published in 2010 to not use the latest edition of Visual Studio available (2010) is a little disappointing. What is confusing is that on p.106, we suddenly jumped to VS 2010 Express – suggesting that the technical editing needs to be tougher.   The structure diagram on pag...

I have been involved with SQL Server since before the first beta versions went out – I was working as a consultant to Microsoft’s Internal Technology Group and we were the bleeding edge folks in those days. I was heavily involved with stressing and performance analysis (given the nick name on my door of “Dr.Science” because of my statistical analysis) and we had the joys of getting up to two different builds a day from the Dev Divisions when we encountered issues.   Today, I have several projects that are likely needed to be cloud-supportable in the near future so it’s time that I get up to speed and hope they don’t re-invent the technology before I need to build commercial systems on it. Two books have come across my desk recently that on first read appear ideal. The first one is on SQL Azure and is not focused on the “Hello World” style of book often seen. A second aspect is that it’s a new-kid-on-the-block publisher, and often they do a better job then the old folks who find...